We know that the inflaton and dark energy cause accelerated expansion of space, but we don't know what they are. We are pretty sure that space‐time is not nothing, but we don't know what it is. In this paper space‐time is modeled as an expanding set of self‐reproducing quantum states. The roles of the inflaton and dark energy are played by space‐time itself. The model reproduces all of the phenomenology of the standard model of particle physics and the standard cosmology with cosmological constant and cold dark matter.